Engaging population towards the study of mathematics is a challenge. It seems like if there was an unwritten social agreement dictating that maths are difficult and boring. This work presents a final degree project under the name of "Desing, planning, implementation and analysis of a mathematics workshop for high school students" that attempts to overcome such situation by divulgating mathematics within high school in a rigorous and enjoyable manner.
Due to the density of the curriculum, there is no space for recreational or applied mathematics.
This project attempts to address such necessity providing a set of activities specially designed for approaching maths from a different point of view. There is no other intention than linking the already acquired knowledge that students have with their daily environment and with concepts of higher mathematics.
The activities have been structured as a workshop which carried out with two groups of
heterogeneous ages. This heterogenity was intentional to promote variety of background within the groups in order to observe if people with reduced background could be pushed up by their workshop mates.
The workshop has been split in six equal sessions for both groups. These sessions have had as main topic: cryptography, probability, geometry, mathematical miscellaneous, fractals and anamorphism. Main topics have been switched in every session in order to give a brief overview of as many different mathematical branches as possible.
All sessions have been structured similarly: an historical note in order to contextualize the main topic, a core consisting of a set of activities, usually from three to five, and a challenge conceived as a link between sessions. The activities and challenges are either designed for linking mathematical concepts with student's life or to discover step by step advanced mathematical concepts.
All sessions have been assessed in order to analyze the engagement of the participants and the acquired concepts.
The aim of the project is learn math while enjoing the process of learning and linking maths to our environment. Once completed the workshop it can be concluded that such goals have been reached.